Instead, the billionaire philanthropist and co-founder of Amway Corp. lived another 21 years. He died Thursday, Sept. 6. He was 92.

By 1997, DeVos had suffered from heart disease for years, endured two strokes and undergone two bypass operations. He said he was just "skin and bones," with a heart that was working at 10 percent to 15 percent of capacity.

That all changed with a trip to London, where he underwent surgery to receive a new heart.

Soon, he was walking on a treadmill, golfing and sailing on his yacht.

He also began working to build up Grand Rapids cardiac care services and lay the groundwork for a local heart transplant program.

In his book, "Hope From My Heart," DeVos described his heart transplant as a miracle for which there was only one explanation: "The grace of God and nothing else."

DeVos said the plan for the operation began when he was in his late 60s. Without informing him, two physicians who were longtime friends, heart surgeon Dr. Luis Tomatis and cardiologist Dr. Richard McNamara, began making inquiries with transplant centers throughout the United States. They did not reveal DeVos' name, only his age, health condition and the fact that he had a rare blood type, AB positive.

After finding no American surgeons willing to take on his case, they contacted Professor Sir Magdi Yacoub, a cardiovascular surgeon in London who had performed about 1,000 transplant surgeries and undertook challenging cases. Yacoub agreed to accept DeVos as a transplant candidate.

DeVos still faced hurdles:

He could receive a heart only if no citizen of the United Kingdom could use it.

The heart had to match his rare blood type.

The heart had to have a large right ventricle to match DeVos' heart, which had enlarged to compensate for the accumulation of fluid in his lungs.

After a five-month wait, a heart became available. A 39-year-old woman who needed new lungs underwent a heart-lung transplant. Her heart was healthy but had developed an enlarged right ventricle to compensate for her impaired lungs.

"The unusual size of her heart made it unsuitable for anyone else but seemed to make it perfect for me," DeVos wrote.

In his weakened state, DeVos' chance of surviving the operation was less than 50 percent.

He pulled through, but the experience was "more difficult than I could have ever imagined," he wrote in his book.

After the operation, he coped with pain, drug-induced nightmares, hallucinations, fear of infection and fear that his body would reject the new heart.

His spirits began to lift after an encounter with another recovering transplant patient he met while walking in the halls of the hospital.

The woman asked about his operation, wanting to know exactly when he got his new heart.

When DeVos told her, the woman smiled and said, "You have my heart!"

"She was alive and well and recovering from her own miracle," DeVos wrote. "Who could have imagined such a possibility?"

DeVos and British health officials bristled at suggestions that DeVos' wealth was the reason he got a new heart.

"He cannot buy a heart; he can only buy his treatment," said a spokeswoman for Britain's Human Organ Transplant Act.

"In our case, we didn't get a heart that somebody else would have used," DeVos said in a 1997 interview. "It would have been a discarded heart."

The connections DeVos made at Harefield Hospital in London bore fruit more than a decade later as Spectrum Health launched the Richard DeVos Heart and Lung Transplant program. DeVos, a longtime Spectrum board member, funded it with a "major" gift from the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation.

The surgeon recruited to lead the program was Dr. Asghar Khaghani, one of the surgeons on the team who performed DeVos' transplant.

Khaghani came to Spectrum in 2010 with an international reputation, having performed more than 1,000 heart transplants.

The first transplant was performed at Spectrum in November 2010. By July 2012, 20 patients had received new hearts, and Spectrum was preparing to begin lung transplants.

DeVos' experience waiting for a heart led him to become an advocate for organ donation.

Aware that few people have the finances to go abroad for a transplant, he encouraged people to register as organ donors to expand the number of organs available in the United States.

In 2003, he testified before a U.S. House subcommittee in support of a plan that would offer financial incentives to people who agree to donate organs.

When DeVos talked about his heart transplant and everything that came after it, his faith was always an integral part of the story.

When he was weak and frail and about to undergo surgery in 1997, he said he didn't welcome death, but was prepared "to meet my God."

Three years later, looking back at the operation, he talked about the hope he found in God's grace.

"Right now, I'm grateful to be alive, because I should be dead," he said in a Grand Rapids Press interview in 2000.